Dan Cohen noted that Machines are often the audience these days. He also wrote about data mining, provided an example in his blog, and warned that we shouldn't allow available tools to guide our inquiry. I spent much of the year developing tools to mine the Dictionary of Canadian Biography and other online repositories.

Choudhury and colleagues demonstrated a new tool for document recognition.

Exactly one year ago, in my first substantive post to this blog I suggested that historians be taught to search, spider and scrape. I still think it's necessary. Re: searching, Dan Cohen discussed the appeal of the single box, and Phil Bradley wrote about the past and future of search engines.

Alan MacEachern started a series called "the Academic Alphabet" in University Affairs: "A is for admissions," "B is for books," and so on. Although he occasionally talks about digital history, he won't get to U until 2008. Good luck, buddy.

The Programming Historian

Are you interested in learning how to program? Check out The Programming Historian, an open-access introduction to Python programming for working historians (and other humanists) with little previous experience.